Dark Gift
by Bald as Malak
Summary: Second chapter up: What do you do if you are tied to the Force, and it lies? A short story about Visas and her escape from her first master.
1. Chapter 1: Dark Gift

**Dark Gift**

I am laughing with my sister, the joy we feel tinting the world around us blue and yellow, gentle eddies dashing back and forth like children between loved ones. Vlaya, like most of my family, shines a reddish gold while a soft melody that speaks of life content in its niche surrounds her. Threads of various thicknesses and colors spreads outward from her, seeking those she loves, her husband, our three brothers, and her two children. Another thread, a thick braid with filaments of gold and red, slices through the blue and gold to link her to me. As we laugh, our connection vibrates, producing a sweet melody that sparkles.

It is the first time I have seen her in a year.

We are twins, my sister and I, and within me also shines a gentle heat of gold and red, though I tend a bit more towards red. It's the passion I have for healing and my family, I say. They like to tease me, saying that it's the pent up energies that come from the lack of a mate.

I always laugh when they needle me on this, though it is true that I am lonely at times. Not often enough to seek a partner, though. My duty as a healer often calls me away from our town, Lmulo, and so makes a relationship difficult. I do not mind, though. Healing is a calling for me, not a profession, and each act of it lifts my soul up. I can not imagine giving it up.

As Vlaya tells me a story about a practical joke her daughter played on a cousin, I let my senses wander. Vlaya and I are in a park, the chorus of life that comprises it a wonderful backdrop to our playful rendezvous. In the nearby brushes, little animals hide from the streams of orange sunlight, their life force like motes of pulsating brown against the steady undulations of green, wet Force that slowly move from root to branch to leaf, and then lift into the sky.

The sky itself is a vibrant, swirling purple today, and I enjoy the tangy taste of rain and thunder to come. We still have a quarter of a day before the downpour arrived, and so, with a glance, my sister and I pause in our conversation to admire the riotous back and forth of the flashes of charged air.

Farther away, beyond the park, the deep green, pulsing flows of trees seem to dart like birds compared to the leisurely, almost solid gray tide that marks the steep hill upon which the trees reside. Inside the gray, thousands of tiny flares of life, of all colours, patterns, and strength interact and mix to produce a rushing swell of noise that, for all the chaos within it, caresses my eyes like the richest melodies.

As a healer, I can sense how the people affect, in subtle ways, each other and the life energies of the hills and trees that surround them. Though I see it every day, I'm still amazed at how intricately we are all intertwined, to each other and to our environment. I still can find no better description for this aspect of our lives than "a dance." We move around each other, sometimes touching, often distant, but never apart. Each of our actions colors the world, and the world colors us. Together, we are always creating something beyond the individual soul, a symphony of indescribable beauty that touches us like the subtlest of flavors until we stop to pay attention. Then it is a whirlwind of indescribable, radiant _vitality_.

As always, at times like this I wish I was a poet.

"Visas, wake up! You are dreaming again…" She is about to say more, but then Vlaya hesitates. I can feel a pulse along the connections she has with her son, Fa'an, a giggle in that takes physical form as a ripple through the fluid wire that connects them. Vlaya's face begins to smile.

And then the connection starts to fray, black voids eating away at it until it is riddled with a horrid… I have no words to describe it… and Vlaya screams and screams.

I reach out, calling on the strength of the life around me, and immerse myself in that thread.

_I won't let him die_, I vow to Vlaya, and I push my soul along the pathway between Vlaya and Fa'an even as it, incomprehensibly, _fades_, all color, sound blending, becoming the growl of ending hunger. As I pass each rent in the fabric that binds son to mother, I frantically cast a portion of the life within me into it, sealing the gaps. I never stop to see how well my healing has taken hold.

I am almost there, almost to Fa'an, but then Fa'an is no longer. Where his scratchy voice, the prelude to his manhood, and his blue-green checkered patterns should have been, there is… we Miraluka have no word for it! A shadow, a non-life, spreading, consuming and where it goes there is… unbearable silence. That hunger is following the connections from what had been Fa'an, withering them even as it hunts all those that are… _oh Force!_… were bound to him. Including me.

I should have died then, separated from my body, but the healings I had done on the way stood like little rocks across an otherwise cascade of frantic, fraying energies. Not hesitating, I throw my life energy at the first soul-hold, and then at the next, and so on as fast as I can, leaping desperately from one to the other even as the small sanctuaries are consumed by the raging hunger that chases me. Even as I flee, the world wails around me, all its swimming, crashing, wondrous harmony unraveling, streaking into sameness, into… _no, it can not be!_

And then, I can see my body, a beacon now fully red, rapidly diminishing amidst a crushing dark. I lunge towards it with all that I have left.

Even as I struggle to become aware of my surroundings, my body is instinctively turning towards Vlaya. I don't know if I intend to protect her, to comfort her, or something else, but it doesn't matter. Where her vibrant sunset hues had brushed against mine there is a silence louder than any noise.

For the first time in my life, I can not see.

I cast about desperately, trying to track her life force. Nothing. I look inside myself, seeking others through their connections to me, but there is… there are…

_No! _My body vibrates to my despairing, echoing agony, but it touches… there is no life for it to touch.

_How can there be…this non-this? _There is no word for what I feel and sense, not in our language. This… and then my memory finally dredges up the word I need to describe what I feel. It is a word from Galactic Basic, which I learned so many years ago.

"Alone."

I had never understood this word until now. Around me, there was… stillness—a bleak unmoving structure without color, surprise, or joining. No dance, no touching, no depth.

I do not know how long I sit there, in my bleached robes in a world unshared. How can I measure time in a world without movement? How does one make sense of a world when one is…

No Miraluka has ever been _alone_.

"Isolated. Cut off. Unaware." His voice was cold, without inflection and yet I know that I puzzle him. He is wrapped in a black cloak that eats all light, a color we Miraluka have always been content to leave in space. In his desolate hunger, I see the wispy shadows of my people, keening as they disappear into the … not-life within him. I fling myself towards him, reaching desperately towards the disappearing spider web of my world, but then it is gone.

He, who is… another word bubbles up like fetid gas into my mind. He is…

"Nihlus," he croaks. "Yes, that will be my name. Nihlus."

It is the only word that we Miraluka have that could possibly describe what he is. Nihlus describes the empty spaces between the stars, where life is most difficult to detect. He is much more terrible than that.

He could consume me in the moment of a single gasp, but he does not. Instead, he… considers me.

And then I realize that there is one link, lingering just a fingertip away, brushing against my skin, staining it cold. It beckons me to take it up, to join this… husk. How can one that consumed a world be so… a word jumps between he and I. _Empty_.

Then that black, terrible tentacle touches me again, and I let it in, grasping its offer like a lifeline thrown to a drowning sailor.

* * *

Later, I realize that no one will ever understand why I accepted that hideous gift, why I clung to life when everyone and everything I cared for had just died. The answer is simple, for a Miraluka. 

The only reason why I had not died along with the others was that I had been away from my bonds. When his hunger had passed through me, I had not been there.

But it is not dying that frightens one such as I. When a Miraluka's body expires, her soul floats along the currents of our interconnections, spreading itself among all life. Never dying, the soul would drift, floating in the sea of sounds, flavors, tastes, and smells until it was ready to be reborn.

We were, in other words, whether dead or alive, always touching life even when we were not conscious of it.

When Nihlus approached me, on the ashes of Katarr, I was conscious, alive, but cut off from the world. And that, simply, was _impossible_.

And so, I took the only road to be alive again, to be connected. To be a Miraluka. His dark gift, his offer to bond, I accepted it because the only other option was… it is not an option.

Everyday since then, I search for my people inside him, inside his darkness. If I ever find them, I will join them. Better consumed and dead than adrift, separated.

If I don't find them, then I pray I will lose my consciousness.

I can't be _alone_.


	2. Chapter 2: A Miraluka Never Lies

**Dark Gift**

Chapter 2: A Miraluka Never Lies

* * *

**A/N:**

...1) I will probably work this chapter and the first one into my longer fiction later, after NaNoWriMo is done. But it also fits here.

...2) Thanks as always to Trillian for the great beta. Based on her comments, I rewrote 70 of the story, so if it doesn't work, it's my muse's fault.

BaM

&.

* * *

A Miraluka never lies. How can she? We are connected to each other through the Force, each life a song that is part of symphony that is everywhere, always. A lie would be like an off key instrument in an orchestra of masterful players, so jarring that the entire song would sour, fall apart until the lie was fixed, and the harmony restored.

&.

* * *

There are days when I realize that no one may ever understand why I accepted Darth Nihilus' hideous bonding, why I clung to life when everyone and everything I cared for had just died. But then, I don't believe I will ever meet anyone to whom I will have to explain myself. But if I do, I know what I will say. 

The answer is simple, for one such as I. My name is Visas and I am a Miraluka.

It is not dying that frightens me. When a Miraluka expires, her soul floats along the currents of the weaves that span our worlds, spreading itself until it touches all the life to which we are connected. Never dying, the soul will drift, floating in the sea of sounds, flavours, tastes, and smells of the existence we share until it was ready to be reborn.

In other words, we are… were… always bonded to life even when we were not conscious of it.

But when Nihlus approached me, on the ashes of Kataar, I was conscious, alive, but isolated, cut off from all that made the world what it is. I could not touch the webs of life, could not share awareness with any other. And that, simply, was impossible.

And so, I took the only road I could, to be a Miraluka. His dark gift, his offer to bond, I accepted it because the only other option was… it is not an option.

I had thought that being connected to Darth Nihilus would provide me with the sense of place I needed, and the punishment I deserved. I had thought he would anchor me to my doom, a dark and endless punishment for surviving when my family, my friends, my world died in his dreadful hunger.

But the bond my master offered is a lie. There is no sharing in it, no sense of belonging to something bigger. His presence is everywhere, and but where it touches, it only takes. He gives nothing, not even suffering. We are left listless, without energy to fight back or to even commiserate on our fate with those who have joined us on this hollowed out cadaver of a ship.

I think he wonders sometimes, why I have not revolted yet. I think he thought that our pairing would be fleeting, a momentary step into curiosity quickly snuffed by horror. I think he thought I would despair, or hate, the former leading to my self-demise, the latter to the sacrifice of my soul to the endless hunger he believes is the source of his power.

And it is true that, sometimes when the despair seems overwhelming, I tempt him to take my life. In these moments of weakness, I wonder if I could find my family on the other side of his hunger, if my world is waiting for me in some other existence to which his power pulled them.

But he doesn't take me and I don't take that extra step beyond the boundary of his tolerance. I'm not sure why.

&.

* * *

When I lived on Kataar, life was about sharing, about being part of a greater whole, of being part of an ongoing dance to celebrate the mystery of life. That was the Miraluka way, but our way is… was a lie. 

Sentients are always alone, always different, always strangers to one another and because we deny it, because we struggle against our loneliness, all that we do is harm ourselves and others. Like my twin sister, who mocked me over my lack of a mate. Or how the other Miraluka thought I was strange when I chose healing over the bearing of children. I was an outsider to them, but my strangeness was denied, submerged to fit the greater pattern imposed by our connections through the Force, by the illusion of belonging that it brought.

I still hate the isolation, and I still miss the pull of the quivering threads that used to bind me to my family and the other Miraluka. But I no longer let that fear rule me. Despite all those tortured souls who walk outside my door, despite the dark tentacles that feed upon the fibres of my soul every moment, I am alone.

I always was, though the truth was hidden from me until my master stripped away the illusions of my world.

&.

* * *

_Today, the sun tastes like those human apples the traders brought to us occasionally, while its fingers of light reflect off the bubbles of laughter that rise from the playing children, making them seem like glimmering jewels that dance to the rhythm of the parent's joy. Stretching among the children, between them and the onlooking adults, and stretching into distance, the bonds between our race seem to undulate gently today, as if a light winds plays across them. I feel like I am one string of the ghylet, the stringed instrument that my twin loves to play… I can hear her now, she is…_

The clank of a blaster rifle hitting the wall of my room shatters the images in my mind, and I wake up. My hard, narrow bed is soaked and clammy with the sweat of my body. Whispers drift by, as listless as the muted footsteps of those who pass by my door. I pull my body up from the bed, and reach out to the wall beside me, using it to guide me to the 'fresher; on the wall, there is cold, bitter-smelling dew that raises goosebumps on my poor naked body. My feet slap against the hard metal beneath, like tiny corpses falling to the cut of a lightsabres. The ship shakes before I reach the door, and the metal all around me rings like the mourning bells on Toolneh.

It still amazes me that I can see and know the world in such a different way now, when I was used to the colourful threads and humming songs of the Force. Miraluka always dismissed these physical sensations as crude, unworthy, but we were wrong. They merely seem sadder because they are not as easily shared with others as Force perceptions are.

I think now that even the Force denies its own loneliness. It is everywhere, and yet there is no one other for it, no equal with whom it can communicate, share stories, argue, make love. I think this is why it seems to create conflicts between "dark" and "light." Such conflicts, and the turmoil they bring the Force, do they distract it from questions it can not answer? Like, what will happen when I die? Why does no one truly understand my heart? Why do I feel _this way_ when the others are distracted, their eyes and ears directed elsewhere, even for a second? Why do I so desperately hate being alone?

I finish my washing, and make my way to the small cabinet besides my bed, pulling on the heavy, clinging clothes that humans use to hide their bodies. They still feel strange to me, for Miraluka do not wear such things. What use was there to hide our bodies when we were all part of one whole?

But I have come to find these garments… comforting. Where I, like the others of my consumed race, once dismissed them as an illusion of isolation, I now welcomed their quiet company as I move from my bedroom to my meditation chamber. Their warmth, the sliding of cloth against my thighs as I walk, the rustle of my dress as it brushes against the floor, the slight tugging around my torso as I settle myself down on the ground between the pillars. It is like the play of the Force, but somehow freer. It is I who experiences the sensations; they are not filtered by some massive consciousness who is trying to draw us into its cloying fantasy of divine bliss.

I start to breath deeply, filling my lungs with the stale, corpse-cold air that fills the ship, welcoming its simple promise of an end—the one thing that all sentients share. Even the Force, which has lived since time began, can die, its supposed immortality revealed as another lie as it dies screaming in the ravenous maw my master carries within him.

I wonder for a moment what it must feel like for something that has always lived to suddenly feel its impending mortality. But my task calls me. My master wants me to locate others powerful in the Force.

Once my spirit settles into a state of detached watchfulness, I extend my senses to search for other powers in the nearby sectors. And like each other time, the first impressions overwhelm me.

I am struck by how differently I see the universe now that Nihilus has trained me. My master's sight is vast, beyond the scale used by the roiling masses of sentience. In his eyes, stars and planets are scattered, shimmering jewels connected by resplendent, flowing lines of the Force. At this scale, the web of the Force seems static, like at an immensely large and elaborate necklace that has been carelessly tossed onto the darkest velvet.

But though the tapestry to which my master has opened my eyes is beautiful, today I find myself distracted by something else, a presence that I can't describe or connect to. It is something that has been haunting the edges of my senses more and more of late, but this time its manifestation is much stronger.

_Al'keh_. Its name floats sideways into my mind though I don't know where it comes from.

_What is Al'keh?_

I try to follow the thread of that suggestion, try to trace it through the Force but I find nothing, not even an echo.

_Al'keh_, I hear again, and once more my search for the source yields nothing.

On and on it goes, one word whispered and a futile questing for its source.

The voice, I realize gradually, is not a voice. There is nothing to it, no personality, no sound, no cadence, nothing. It is there in my mind, and yet it has no characteristics that I can tie to any life I know. Somehow, though the word keeps repeating itself in my mind, it is like it is not there, was never there, and will not be there even when I hear the word uttered again.

_It has no substance, colour, movement, no life. It is like the cold dark space, between the strands of the Force, beyond the farthest star, the darkness that the stars strain so futilely with their light to dismiss… _

_And that's where I should look for it._

I try to pull my senses from the Force, try to find the places in between the threads that bind and connect all life. Suddenly, I feel like a fly caught in a web, futilely trying to wrest itself free from the sticky clutches of the spider's beautiful prison. I can't do it. I hadn't realized until now that my escape from the Force, the one I had just been gloating over earlier this morning, was as much an illusion as the stifling harmony of my extinct race.

_Am I doomed to live this lie?_

But I don't want to give up, I'm so tired of twisted truths, even the softest and most well meaning. I reach into myself, and I call upon the loneliness inside me, all the places where I was severed from those around me, all the dispelled fantasies of belonging and shared love and I thrust them at the Force, until it seems to wail and flee from me.

It's only for a moment, I can feel the sweet, cloying scent of the Force closing in on me like a hundred perfumed aunts, but I flee my body before I can be trapped again, thrusting myself into the emptiness between in which I half expect to be extinguished.

But I am not. Instead, I seem to float, outside of time, sensation, or any wisdom. There are no bright stars or scrabbling claws of hunger to battle over my attention, no fears and wants to drive me forward, no sensation to distract me. There is only this, and this is nothing. And I am nothing in it.

Who could have told me that silent spaces could seem so welcoming? How can emptiness have so many forms, so many subtle shades on non-colour or, so many tones of silence? All my fears, my self-loathing, everything that moves within me is quiet and I just am. I just not-Visas in that-which-is-not.

I'm not sure how that which is not can have a name, but there is no other way to refer to it.

It speaks to me, creating an illusion of joining so impossible that I feel my very soul dissolve. And yet somehow I'm reconstructed, each miniscule element of my being instantaneously reformed, reattached, and reintegrated into the same being I was, save for one droning voice.

_Al'keh. It awakens fear in everything, and yet it calls to you as well. It is why the space pilot abandons her home and family to travel the stars, and yet can never name what draws her there. It is why humans are always drawn to explore new frontiers, and yet find each new discovery fleeting and unsatisfying. It is why you are all always alone, even when the thickest strands of the Force bind you to the overwhelming and unavoidable crescendo of life. Al'keh is what lies on the other side of existence. _

_When you scream in the middle of night, and hope that no one hears you, it is to Al'keh that you reach. When you search for silence, not as a means of forgetting pain or escaping the chaos of life, but simply for its own sake, it is Al'keh that you seek. When exile is not a mourned separation from others but a journey voluntarily undertaken, your path brings you closer to Al'keh. _

_Al'keh is not darkness. It is what is left when you abandon the knowledge and imagination of what light is. It is not death, it is what was before life was born and will be when everything dissipates into the void. It is not nothingness. It is all that was always there before the Force had eyes to see, ears to hear, and mouths to taste. There are no words to describe Al'keh, because to find it means the abandonment of being. _

_You can never truly understand Al'keh, because you are and Al'keh is not. And you nor any other follower of life can ever touch it, claim it._

_But one of you has._

And then I'm in my body, in my meditation chamber and no time has passed, nothing has happened or changed. Even my master, who guards all the possible pathways of my escape like the most jealous lover, is unaware that I had stepped out of… all this.

But everything is different now, for I know that there can be an escape from this lie, that there is another truth out there.

But I also know that I will never be able to escape to Al'keh again. I can feel the Force's, like the parent of a lost child finally found, tighten its grip on me as if it will never let me go again, smothering all my future freedom in the name of "protection."

But if I can not escape on my own, perhaps the other that Al'keh referred to can help me. It's a hope I grasp desperately.

_Someone has connected to Al'keh._

It seems so impossible, but why would Al'keh lie? It does not have the desires, fears, or other characteristics of life that we have. How could such a thing even understand a lie?

_Could it be Darth Nihilus who has touched Al'keh? Is that where his power comes from? _And yet, a new part of me, an insight derived from stepping beyond the Force, tells me that this is not the right answer. I can feel him, his dark feeding tentacles forming an undulating web that seems to mock the Force's bright tapestry. He has not escaped the Force, he is just another side of it. He could never give it up. For all his talk about ridding the universe of the chaos brought about the Force, I see now that he is lying, not only to me but to himself. He doesn't consume the Force to kill it, he consumes it because he covets it. Like a spice addict, he loves and hates what he can not give up. I think, despite all of his words, he can't imagine that there will ever be an end to the Force, that there will be a day when he can not feed upon it.

And, tasting his darkness now, I realize also that within him is a fear buried so deep, I wonder that I can see it so clearly now. He is afraid that another will take his place. There is another, one in whom the hunger grew. My master borrows that power like a servant who fancies himself lord of the household when the matriarch is gone, hoping desperately that she will never return.

_Is she the one I must find?_

My master should be able to find her easily, but his fears hide her from him. But no longer from me. The hunger within her is easy to locate, now that I know what to look for.

I must go see her, the one who calls herself the "Exile." I need to see if she has somehow bonded with Al'keh.

If she his, I will find a way to make her help me touch Al'keh again. Because the only way to not feel this eternal loneliness is to not be.

I need to find her. I have to find her. I need to know how she has done it, how she has become the boundary that which is and that which isn't.

But my master will not let me go, will he? Will he let me go when I tell him that I seek an escape from the illusions that the Force and he have spun?

But I have to go, I must convince him to let me go.

Miraluka don't lie. But I will.


End file.
